A kiss turned away.

There was no kiss and that is not why it “was turned away”, these words depict the almost there but not really moment, the disappointment of it, how we can extrapolate mundane events to life shattering proportions.

 It reminds me of this episode of Artscene about performance art. Let me paint you a picture.

The room is spacious the audience is standing around along all walls. All surfaces -walls and floor are painted white. There is no furniture and the walls are bare. A mound of red soil here, a few stones there some twigs with pieces of cloth tied on perhaps meant to be flags (no one knows). They are arranged in some pattern a kind of jigsaw puzzle. If you squint you can see it. The centre piece is a small bodied woman she can’t be beyond her mid twenties but her body is that of a teenager. She is clad in a fitting hooded costume with a patchwork pattern of white and reddish brown, the color of the soil. The stage is set.

 She is now on all fours slowly crawling lithely from one mound of rubble to the next. Excruciatingly slow-it is part of the act. It is a mime act, a fill in the blanks get-what-you-will act. In the audience some look on with feigned interest holding their breaths as they follow the act pretending to understand but all the while wondering whether it would be unreasonable to ask for a refund. Others have already given up trying and struck conversations under their breaths seemingly discussing the act before them. It’s about the post election violence but you can’t tell.

 

Back to that kiss. This is a fictitious account of my day, if it seems real it’s because it happened.

 I am not entirely sure I was conscious of the moment as it happened or whether it was brought on by having ordered a grossly expensive meal. I walked into the restaurant at the spur of the moment like turning a corner, as if all along I knew that this is where I was going to dine. I had never been here. As I sat and looked around to acclimatize I suddenly realized it was way beyond my purse. There were only two other females dining. There is a something to be said of such a scene in a country where the female population is higher.

I drink it all in and brace myself pushing thoughts of alternative places I could be right now as the waiter approaches. The menu is brought and I order at the top of the range, again besides my better judgment as if someone did it for me. I mentally count the contents of my purse. I was only dealing with consequences here.

 As the meal is brought I am suddenly not hungry, but I dig in and strike a conversation in my head. I shuffle between several people I would like seated with me and settle on conversing with myself. She forces me to think things over, my life and such. Outside the window I watch people rushing around minding their own business and I envy them. I am back to her she wants me to think of the state we are in. The fact that I am broke again.

“We have to stop living like thiiiis,” she moans.

 It finally dawns on me that my BSC is worth crap.

I am now back to college that point in time when I knew this seemingly new fact to be true. When I had a choice to walk away before it was too late, but I had just started a new romance. I could not admit it then but it made me stay, not him but it. This new unknown thing and the prospects of its future made me stay the four years needless to say it lasted two.

Should I have dropped out then and grabbed my life by the balls? Start afresh now that I had no encumbrance? I went with the flow i was a coward and here we are…

 Afterwards, very stuffed I find myself at an ATM at a corner of another street looking at the slip. It’s a three digit number. I instinctively reach into my bag as I walk away and retrieve the cell. My pride dips and I call all those not-so-good freelance offers I had left hanging hoping they would still want me.

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